Salome

by Richard Strauss (libretto based on Oscar Wilde's play)

seen at Covent Garden on 17 January 2018

David McVicar's 2008 production is here revived directed by Bárbara Lluch with Henrik Nánási conducting Malin Byström as Salome, Michael Volle as Jokanaan, John Daszak as Herod and Michaela Schuster as Herodias.

If the court of Mantua in Rigoletto was corrupt in last night's production from Covent Garden (see the review posted yesterday), the court of Herod the Tetrarch in 1st century Judea is irremediably decadent. Once again the rot starts at the top, with Herod lecherously pursuing his step-daughter Salome, virtually ignoring his wife Herodias (Salome's mother) who has become, in this production, a wine-sozzled harridan. The Jewish dinner guests quarrel amongst themselves, outraged by Herod's ignorant blasphemies as much as by reports of the Galilean miracle-worker. One soldier has an unhealthy passion for Salome, leading him to commit suicide when he perceives her wilful disregard for propriety or even common sense; a page loves the soldier; other soldiers torment the prisoner.

And who is the prisoner? It is Jokanaan, otherwise known as John the Baptist, whose prophecies of doom and damnation arise first from the cistern in which he is kept captive, and later spill across the stage when Salome demands to see him face to face then falls obsessively in love with him despite (or perhaps because of) his furious denials and rejections of her allure. It is a short step for her from infatuation to destructive pique: when Herod rashly offers her anything, under oath, if she will dance for him, she does so and then demands Jokanaan's head - much to her mother's delight and Herod's anguish. He has to relent; she can at last kiss the mouth she so desires, but she is unable to tell whether she tastes blood or love, moments before Herod orders her own death.

It is all horrid stuff, wrapped in the beguiling but somewhat super-saturated  poetic prose of Wilde's play, in which decadence and beauty walk perilously hand in hand, and transformed again by the sumptuous and often overwhelmingly passionate music of Strauss. In this production, designed by Es Devlin, faux Orientalism is replaced by a rather grimy modern setting: a luxurious dining room is only hinted at above the main acting area, which is an unprepossessing mixture of servants' quarters and barracks. The soldiers are in khaki and carry guns (though the executioner wields a massive sword and is provocatively stripped naked before descending into the cistern to decapitate Jokanaan). The famous Dance of the Seven Veils, in which Salome titillates Herod, and presumably the audience, is here replaced by a mesmeric psychodrama in which Salome pictures fleeting scenes from her life from infancy onwards in which Herod intruded appropriately, thus grounding her sickening demand in a lifetime of abuse.

All this requires a cast and orchestra of utter skill and conviction to set the scene and allow it to develop and build to its horrific climax without seeming merely overblown and indulgent. This was delivered under the assured direction of Henrik Nánási, with Malin Byström giving a shattering performance as Salome, at first icily in command of the situation, then almost hypnotised by the wild prophet, and finally ruthlessly pursuing her vengeance with no conception of its consequences. John Daszak's hedonistic Herod was an excellent portrayal of a weak man in power, in the last analysis unable to withstand the forces unleashed by his implacable stepdaughter, while Michael Volle's deep baritone infused Jokanaan's prophetic utterances with the supreme otherworldly confidence of the deeply religious cast of mind. 

Kundry in Parsifal succeeds in the first stage of her seduction of the hero, and then discovers that her actions only give him the strength to resist and to offer an alternative which she refuses in fury and curses, only to accept silently after many years. Here, Salome fails to impress Jokanaan, while at the same time being utterly unable to understand what he is talking about when he offers her salvation. Her response is to kill the messenger and to desecrate his remains; in an ecstasy of perverted triumph she is herself destroyed. Thus far had opera travelled in the twenty years or so between Wagner's last work and the first of Strauss's operas to cement his reputation as more than a brilliant composer of tone poems.